Lincoln County Road

Midnight in the garden of blood and eagles.

We’re bleeding from puncture wounds, something viscous, crimson, and warm.

No one tied you down, you rolled up against the dock, buffeting and clunking hollow through the solitary night.

How does anything lay claim to any of it?

Humans, I think I’ve fallen out of love with you now I’ve learned you spurt dirt-drenched aerosols in a jet out front of your faces whenever you laugh or cough or yell or sing. Ew. Really. Fucking ew. That was a revelation on the disappointing side of the ledger. You initially gained points for your relative hairlessness, lost most of them with this. Wear a damn mask, act like a fucking grown-up, and you might regain a few.

Ha, wait. You know what this is like, the strings sweeping over us, the low notes growling under your hallowed contralto like the final tales of long-forgotten wolves. 

“Something’s comin’ over the hill, and I ain’t so sure you gonna like it.”

“Well. Try me, cholo.”

Remember, compadre, we always came to this same piece of waste ground, filled with hazards, and each time we tried to create our own jogo bonito. The feel of the ball a-spin atop your foot, quieting its gyre at the exact right moment, the hock, the updraft, the rainbow, that feeling when you let it fall and check it with your instep, dead, or nestle it like an egg in the nape of your neck, the heartbeat pause, and then all your friends stream your way, laughing, cursing, slapping, and take the ball and do more joy to it, calling you always the best and most beautiful names.

Venerated, unseemly. The ribald colours of longing. 

“Come. This way.”

“You know where we’re heading? How long we’ll be riding?” 

“Follow the spiral dust, and give thanks to the night songs of coyotes.”

“Señorita, if we don’t make it, won’t you feel good about me right to the end?”

“Keep singin’ and playin’, music man. And meet me in Laurel Canyon. Your luck has to turn.” 

Drenched with salt from inside, collected near the shoulder of rock like scarabs, we peek around it, and we see the hopelessness the world tried to spare us.

A black hole spinning blind and silent, an accelerating cluster of stars sucked processional into its holy ravenous lightless maw.

Death. It’s not onrushing. At its moment of truth, it’s a quickening absence, a sucking of an ebbing wave pulling you into the riptide. You feel it hollow and infallible in your chest, an intake of breath and a twinge of hurt before a vast unbreathable pain and before pain is then erased. A great accumulative loss and a great mercy both. That moment. That volatile, hectic instant before everything’s gone.

True, the past echoes and echoes and echoes. Some of it is a story, poured from cut crystal, pored over by feeble old men, teased and unraveled and dreamed of again.

For who, no one knows.

Hear me, though.

The truth is a story too.

And while the landfill’s where it ends, for now—like love and loss—it’s only recycling.

______________________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical falsehood. Glitter and attenuated nudity. What, after all, do you dream?

She wanted to remember all the stuff from before, her oldest friend, her first unencumbered love, and yet she stumbled on it, fumbled her surety, and never quite picked it up. This was the ravens’ time. 

Her sister tried to warn us. She squeezed herself into a space by the Mexican place, the lime of her dress translucent in the late afternoon, Frankie Valli joyous on somebody’s radio. Locale, locale, O margaritaville, I will love you over and again for your sweet fucking face.

My heart so wide, kitty corner, my girl was getting off shift.

“Where is any of this happening?” we heard our mama say. 

“Not entirely sure,” the consensus managed. 

She was right, though, to ask. None of this felt real. Perhaps our stage had been displaced, or endless asphalt suddenly emerged like a new undreamed-of stage, where quiet Canadians might just drive a monster Dodge and jump the curb and grind the bones of the infidel. Or more likely the innocent. Blastocysts and freaks. Thermonuclear glow and schism and shear and bellow and bloom, a groan from bellow. A killing ground upon which our raven idol endlessly chides and scolds.

We’ve been hearing auroras and cicadas wrong all this time. Loneliness is breaking us.

Sometimes you think I know you love me, but I just jumble all those words. 

I met her out back, and we merged our hands and strolled beside the canal after sunset. Lights in some of the barges orange-cozy hearts. Inns and taverns looming and leaning, a night of sheer, an urgent whisper: be here, stay here, be heard, always heed the night birds. 

A lonesome drunken song lamenting paucity. 

“How is it we only meet when everything is wrong?” she asked.

I was quiet. I had no answer. 

“Well?” she tried again. 

Perhaps, I thought, it takes our twisted theory of string to find some unravelled knot and tie a new entire universe atop our flailing premise, but thankfully I never got around to voicing such a desperate and stillborn thing.

____________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Splendour Without Diminishment

Here a dark house cached in a deep, dark wood when the wind awakes.

Spiralling unlikely in the riled air, torn switches of cedar and fir ride the bluster, ripped and rising and falling, brief and tiny brooms to sweep the fitful air nonetheless ordained to meet the littered ground. The roar through lashing branches primal, the howl of some great maddened deity, a shriek of tragic choruses, oceanic, passionate of its ownself, nonchalant of all others. 

It’s like we forgot the incendiary pulse of fire. Forgot the faces of our grandfolk. 

Forgot that balance isn’t symmetry, and all the rest.

***

This isn’t my apocalypse. I don’t know why it’s fallen on me to tell it. But tell it I might. 

Nothing happens for any reason whatsoever. It’s all just fluke. Finding these legal pads and a clutch of old lead pencils was a random thing. But it ended up conferring something on me. Like, the tribe has spoken and I am its scribe, or some such portentous bullshit. No, it’s fluke. It’s chance. It’s stupid. 

***

I dreamed of Tekahionwake. She and Chief Capilano were seated in a longhouse at a large elliptical table filled with a great spread: venison, buffalo, succulent salmon, steaming bannock. Quiet people moved in the shadows. At the table, the two great friends were discussing Emily Carr in a way that made me feel strange and uncomfortable. At last I spoke up.

“Emily isn’t here to defend herself,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.

“Did you know my given name is also Emily?” asked Tekahionwake.

“I didn’t. You mean English? I thought it was Pauline. But wait, no, I kind of did. E. Pauline, right?”

She didn’t say the word itself, but her face was eloquent enough. “Precisely.” 

And already she was lost in another of Joe’s big tales. Already I’d forgotten why I’d cared. I only know a poet must be treasured by her tribe.

Awake, if pressed, I’d guess this dream related times long gone and now forever lost.

***

No one stands alone. 

This place. This dark and shining place. This arid dripping place. This flat and craggy place. The Salish Sea to the Kootenays, the Chilcotin and the Cariboo. Haida Gwai to the great Peace River. Similkameen. Musqueam. This edible grass that grows in the sea. At last we can drop the quotidian and give it the name it always craved. 

I hereby name you Konaway Tilikum. 

“Every people.”

The forests sigh in relief. The mountains sigh in relief. The inlets and islands sigh in relief. Orcas filter dawnlight through expelled mist. The small coastal wolves do a shuffle on the pebble beach. The spirit bear yawns and licks her lips and walks the balance beam of a downed hemlock. The sockeye dream of a comeback. The monarchs too. The raven chuckles and nods. The eagle ignores it all. Silverthrone awaits his day.

The role of storyteller dismembered, parcelled off, each character its own perspective, as it always was. The mosses. The sword ferns. The nurse logs. The living green breath of the understory.

No one will ever paint this now. No one will know what a painting even is. 

Window

“Heal, heal, little frog’s tail

If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

*

These are life’s moments sans frames.

Uncle Fred loans him his classic convertible for the day. Tyrell revels in the breezes of the city, even if they’re redolent of asphalt and bitumen. He feels his maleness distilled. He imagines a simpler time, a world of clean skies and sullied earth, of bright busy crowds and dirty, scheming besuited men and acid women leaking betrayal.

His smile is a midsummer signal. 

When he hears the brief yelp of the siren, the sun at its noonday apex, he’s so honey-sated pollinated and sure he isn’t speeding that his guard is down. 

There’s a shadow at his window ’bout to fall across his whole life.

“Hello, officer. How can I help you, my dude?”

“Hands on the fucking wheel! Now!”

We don’t need to see it; we’ve already seen it. Some mother will see her son’s last moments on some stranger’s body camera.

***

“They didn’t take his life; they took the rest of his life.” 

“What’s the difference?”

“I just like accuracy.”

***

Through a smeared window, I watched her. She stared ahead, at a wall. The wall had some old school swirly design in red that I can’t describe, and probably has a name, yet it stayed with me, this moment, this scene, her yellow hair around her architectural shoulders, her still eyes, a room smoky with age and all the mundane moments it had held.

A choice came to me. Leave now and this would dissipate, or go in and rewire destiny.

I went in.

***

It’s an eye. An eye isn’t a window to anything. It looks out not in. If it offends, pluck it out. Be my guest. Take that razor and slice, my Andalusian dog.

Let’s get biblical and trade. Leave the whole world blind.

For the sake of the sacred and the profane, please, obliterate the pane.

*

“Sana, sana, colita de rana

Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana.”

______________________

Image © David Humphrey

Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer hands.” 

“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”

The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”

“I prefer things that way.”

“Mayhap a poet too?”

“I didn’t mean for me.”

A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.

***

She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.

He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.

Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.

Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.

Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.

***

After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge. 

Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.

Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.

We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now. 

__________

Image © Thomas Holmes